British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sacked Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahavi on Sunday after a tax filing investigation revealed violations of the ministerial code.
According to ReutersSunak asked an independent consultant to review the tax records of Zahavi, who was finance minister for a short period last year during the country’s political unrest.
In a letter to Nadhim Zahavi, Rishi Sunak wrote that he was forced to act after promising early in his term that his government would “be honest, professional and accountable at all levels”.
The UK Prime Minister this week ordered an urgent inquiry into the Tory Party chairman’s tax returns after Nadhim Zahavi, a minister without executive portfolio, admitted over the weekend that he had paid several million dollars in unpaid taxes related to the time he ran the country’s treasury but said he paid shortly after discovering the tax error, admitting it was “involuntary”.
Nadhim Zahavi, founder of research website YouGov, acknowledged the dispute with the country’s tax authorities but said his mistake was “careless and unintentional.”
The British press reported that the tax settlement amounted to nearly £5m (nearly 5.7m euros) in debt linked to the polling company YouGov, which he founded in 2000.
When he became finance minister last summer, a position he held from July to September, he explained that “questions arose” about his “tax affairs,” especially about the shares in his company that his father owned.
Nadhim Zahavi headed the UK Treasury during the final months of Boris Johnson’s tenure as prime minister.
The Labor Party, Britain’s main opposition party, called for the resignation of Zahavi, whose position it considered “untenable” and urged the prime minister to reveal all he knew about the case.
“The whole story undermines public confidence when the minister in charge of national finance asks the population to pay taxes, although he himself apparently did not,” criticized the number two in the Labor Party, Angela Rayner at the time.